Tadd Smejkal has been selected as the Systems Engineering and Operations (SEO) Director for the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Tadd will lead the SEO department, which provides a core set of IT services including virtualization (private cloud), critical infrastructure, application hosting, systems administration, enterprise storage, backup and archive, data center services, IT service and incident management, public cloud engineering and provisioning, 24/7 operations, and digital publishing and printing services.
“I’m excited to be joining the Systems Engineering and Operations team, particularly during this transformative time of cloud technologies, hybrid IT concepts and ‘DevSecOps’ culture gaining traction,” Tadd said. “We have incredible opportunities to partner with campus, UW System and DoIT to develop the next generation of IT infrastructure solutions. Systems Engineering and Operations will be a key participant in that transformation.”
Tadd has been the interim director for SEO since December 2018. During that time, he directed the technology selection, budget model and negotiation for UW Madison’s Research Data Storage initiative, oversaw the development of the department’s first set of operational metrics and competitive benchmarking, and planned and executed remediation efforts to enable several SEO services to comply with HIPAA program requirements. Tadd has established positive relationships with stakeholders on campus, at DoIT and within the University of Wisconsin System.
Prior to his interim assignment, Tadd was a senior manager at Paradigm for about six years, where he oversaw the development of the company’s software-as-a-service application portfolio for a global customer base including Fortune 50 companies. He also led the adoption of and migration to Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure for their application hosting needs. His focus was on high availability, high performance, quality, security and efficiency gained through automated provisioning and service management.
Prior to Paradigm, Tadd worked at TDS Telecom—a national provider of broadband, TV and phone service with operations in 32 states—for 15 years. Tadd began his career as a software developer and then steadily progressed to senior manager. During that time, he led custom software development, application integration middleware and support for Oracle applications.
Tadd brings over 22 years of information technology and leadership experience to the role of the Systems Engineering and Operations Director. He has deep knowledge and experience in many areas of IT and can contribute technical expertise and leadership experience to our strategic initiatives. Over the last year, he made significant progress toward service excellence with improved services, enhanced security and vastly improved relationships with both internal and external stakeholders. I’m delighted to have Tadd in the permanent position.
Tadd is a graduate of Edgewood College with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. He assumes the permanent role effective December 1.
—Dave Pagenkopf, Deputy CIO